07.10.08
Question and answer question period
Should you question questions? Could question leads signal flabby writing? Did you have any doubts?
I ask these inane questions to demonstrate the futility of trying to draw the reader into a piece of writing by posing questions. For a real-world example, here’s a quote from near the beginning of a course description, designed, I would imagine, to help entice possible matriculators to sign up:
What are the benefits of old age?
Excuse me while I pause to consider the multitude of snappy retorts that don’t involve socks and sandals. Let’s just revert to the classic, then: “Avoiding the alternative.”
The fact that I’m pondering potential snarky answers demonstrates one of the more severe detriments of using questions to begin articles or establish transitions: they can set off readers’ smart-aleck radar, slowing the reading experience. A less flashy but equally severe problem is that facilely stated questions often signal that the writer is warming up or searching for a way to enter the story and choosing an easy tool rather than working to enter at a more compelling moment.
The question is one of a number of hackneyed signals of wordiness or simple authorial floundering. Other hackneyed forms include:
- One-word opening declarations. For example, “Pretentious. That’s a perfect word to describe articles that begin with a single pretentious word—in this example, the word pretentious.”
- Describing the very beginning of a story. For example, “George woke up that morning . . .” Oooh! Tell me more!
- It should be obvious, but any sentence beginning with the word it. For example, “It was a dark and stormy night before George woke up that morning . . .”)
Because, you see, waking up in the morning is one of the benefits of old age.
, 
and 
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JohnnyB said,
July 10, 2008 at 9:49 am
As for opening with “he woke up that morning”, what about an opening such as this:
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”
(Originally: “Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.”)
Bill Brohaugh said,
July 10, 2008 at 11:19 am
Yeah yeah yeah, and “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” by that other hack, Dickens.
As for Gregor, waking up in the morning is OK if you do it in German.
Susan said,
July 10, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Our newletter editor and I always laugh when we farm out articles to other departments because we know half of them will start, “What is ?”
Bill Brohaugh said,
July 10, 2008 at 8:46 pm
I’m nodding, Susan, and taking a wild guess that half of those starting “What is ?” then say “Webster’s Dictionary defines XXX as . . . “
Susan said,
July 11, 2008 at 12:49 pm
My “What is ?” should have looked like “What is XXX?” but I wrote ‘topic assigned’ and used html brackets which got translated into a blank – silly me. But I see you got the point. And you are right!